IT MAY BE unrealistic to expect that the Communist powers could explicitly admit that their past record over observing agreements has been bad. In the present international system few governments would be willing to incur the loss of face involved in such an admission. It would, however, be possible for the Communist powers (if they are sincere in wanting negotiations to reduce world tensions) to admit implicitly that there is a lack of trust in the value of promises of future performance and to work for agreements which would go as far as possible in providing guarantees for performance.

AS THEIR state chairman says,the Republicans in California are facing their moment of truth. Alarmed by the Democratic sweep in the June 3 primary, Vice President Nixon, GOP official of varying heft and profundity, and possibly even President Eisenhower will troop up and down the Golden State between now and November, trying to rescue ungainly Bill Knowland from the wrath of the voters. But most of the 1960 Democratic Hopefuls will also be pitched in for the party in California.

Vladimir Nabokov is best known, if he is known at all, as one of those ghostly heroes on the out-of-print register, fondly perpetuated by a mute coterie. It is quite in order, this soft pedal. Nabokov has at least two things going against him in this life which later on will make him the foremost retread of the day. He is wildly and liquidly sophisticated, and he writes as well as any man alive.
With the publication of Lolita (1955) by a wayward English press in Paris, some fresh irony was laid on the idyll of Nabokov's literary reputation.

BRANDON: Russia’s launching of two satellites was a great shock to the Western world. Do you think American scientists or the government were to blame for Russia’s being ahead of the United States in this field?
RABI: Of course there’s not so terribly much science in Sputnik. It’s chiefly a matter of engineering. We need to make headway in exploring new fuels, and in improving electronic guidance systems and engine designs. All this is not basic science. It does not mean that the Russians are ahead of us in basic science, but they are probably well ahead in rocketry.

AT THE END of the first part of this critique it was concluded that NATO’s current military doctrines and forces all too closely resemble what Mr. George F. Kennan said in his Reith Lectures on the BBC that they ought to be, with the unhappy consequence that many people in Britain and on the Continent have convinced themselves that Mr.

DISENGAGEMENT is no longer a dirty word in the Western diplomatic vocabulary. In principle, most NATO governments now recognize that disengagement might offer a way out of their current dilemmas. But so far, most of the supporters of disengagement have either left their ideas too vague for serious discussion or have arbitrarily tied disengagement to other conceptions which are even more controversial. George Kennan, for example, in his Reith Lectures, did as much as any other single person to awaken international interest in the idea of disengagement.